1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method, and more particularly, a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method that achieve the detection of a locally protruding lesion.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, observations using image pickup equipment such as X-ray diagnostic apparatus, CT, MRI, ultrasound observation apparatus, and endoscope apparatus have been widely made in the medical field. In the image pickup equipment, for example, an endoscope apparatus includes an insertion portion which is insertable into a body cavity, and has operation and configuration such that an image of the inside of a body cavity which is formed by an objective optical system disposed at the distal end portion of the insertion portion is picked up by an image pickup section such as a solid state image pickup device and the image is outputted as an image pickup signal, as the result of which the image of the inside of the body cavity is displayed on a display section such as a monitor based on the image pickup signal. Then, a user observes an organ and the like in the body cavity for example, based on the obtained image of the inside of the body cavity displayed on the display section such as a monitor.
The endoscope apparatus enables a direct pickup of an image of mucous membrane of digestive tract. This allows a user to make a comprehensive observation of the color of mucous membrane, the shape of lesion, the minute structure on the mucous membrane surface, for example. And in recent years, endoscope apparatuses have been proposed in which, based on data of a two-dimensional image corresponding to an picked-up image of the inside of a body cavity, a three-dimensional model of the inside of the body cavity can be estimated.
In addition, in such an endoscope apparatus, the detection of an image that contains a lesion site such as a polyp can be also achieved by using an image processing method described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-192880 for example, as an image processing method for detecting a predetermined image which contains a locally protruding lesion.
The image processing method described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-192880 extracts the outline of an inputted image and detects a locally protruding lesion in the image based on the outline shape.